# Are We Repeating the Ottomans' Blind Spot? Source: https://mamdouh.dev/en/ottoman-blind-spot AI text endpoint: https://mamdouh.dev/api/ai/en/ottoman-blind-spot Language: en Direction: ltr Published: 2026-04-12 Tags: history, technology, ai, society Reading time: 6 min Short reading time: 5 min Translations: https://mamdouh.dev/ar/ottoman-blind-spot ## Description An essay about the printing press, the Ottomans' blind spot around it, and what we can learn as we look at artificial intelligence today. ## Long version ## **When Books Became Cheap** In the 1450s, the German Johannes Gutenberg developed a system for printing with movable metal type. Before him, copying one book took months of work from a dedicated scribe. After him, hundreds of copies could be printed in days. Printing presses spread across Europe within decades. Books became cheaper and reached hands they would never have reached before. Then everything accelerated: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution. But that shift did not properly reach the Islamic world until almost 280 years later. --- ## **They Were Not Stupid** The Ottomans were not anti-technology. The Ottoman state adopted cannons and rifles before they were widespread in Europe itself, and imported gunpowder and tobacco without hesitation. But it looked at the printing press and did not see why it mattered. The press was a tool built for the Latin alphabet. What it produced in Arabic looked ugly compared with manuscript calligraphy. No one was asking for printed books, and no one was complaining about a shortage of books. So the state ignored it for roughly 280 years. What is striking is that the technology was not far away. Istanbul's Jews founded a Hebrew press in 1493, during the reign of Sultan Bayezid II himself. Armenian presses followed in 1567, and Greek presses in 1627. The printing press was in the same room. But nobody thought it belonged to them. --- ## **A Tool That Was Not Built for Us** Arabic type needed around **900 typographic forms** to cover connected and disconnected letter shapes, compared with roughly 150 for Latin script. Printing in Arabic cost several times more, and the result was worse. The first attempt to print the Quran, in Venice in 1537, made things worse. The edition was full of errors, nobody bought it, and the press shut down. That experience hardened the idea that printing and Arabic simply did not mix. More than a century later, the French orientalist Antoine Galland described what he saw in Istanbul's markets between 1672 and 1673: printed medical books gathering dust on shelves while the same manuscript versions sold easily despite their higher price. People saw the printed book as a cheap, low-value object. The conclusion made sense: this tool is not for us. But the right response was not to reject the tool. It was to invest in making it work for Arabic the way it worked for Latin. Nobody did that for 280 years. --- ## **The Resistance** The blind spot was not only political. Three forces worked together to keep the printing press outside the Islamic world: **Those who feared for their livelihoods.** Scribes and calligraphers were everywhere in Istanbul. The Italian traveler Marsigli claimed there were tens of thousands of them in the late seventeenth century, even if the number was exaggerated. They responded creatively: they produced lower-quality, cheaper manuscripts to compete with printed books, and even marched to the Sultan's palace carrying a coffin filled with their pens and inkwells in protest. They were not backward. They were people with real interests defending their income. **Those who feared for their authority.** Religious scholars feared that printing would make it easier to spread books that attacked doctrine or weakened their monopoly over interpreting religious texts. Sultan Bayezid II may even have been politically smart when he restricted Arabic-script printing while allowing non-Muslims to print freely. Decades later, the Protestant Reformation shook Europe, and the press was its fuel. In *Rulers, Religion, and Riches*, the economist Jared Rubin explains that religious scholars were one of the pillars from which the Sultan drew legitimacy. The press threatened that arrangement from the root. **A society that did not see the need.** The historian Francis Robinson argued that Islamic education was built around isnad: knowledge passed orally from teacher to student through a connected chain. The credibility of knowledge depended on "who taught you," not what was printed on a page. The relationship with the Quran was also built more on recitation, memorization, and listening than on reading from a page, which weakened the urgent demand for printed copies. The rejection came from the base of society, not only from the top. But absence of demand is not absence of need. 3% The literacy rate among Muslims in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the nineteenth century, compared with forty to sixty percent in northwestern Europe --- ## **The Price of the Blind Spot** When Ibrahim Muteferrika received a decree from Sultan Ahmed III in 1727, he printed only seventeen books across thirteen years before his press stopped in 1742. It was almost three centuries late. Meanwhile, the historian Donald Quataert noted that literacy among Muslims in the Ottoman Empire did not exceed three percent at the beginning of the nineteenth century, compared with forty to sixty percent in northwestern Europe. For context: Russia, which was also late to adopt the press, was only around five percent. The gap was not between East and West. It was between those who adopted the printing press and those who did not. A 2011 study by the economist Jeremiah Dittmar found that European cities that adopted the press in the fifteenth century **grew sixty percent faster** than comparable cities. A 2022 quantitative study by Bogdan Popescu and Mircea Popa, after analyzing 600 years of data, also concluded that regions under Ottoman rule for longer periods had much lower literacy rates well into the twentieth century. Many factors contributed to the Ottoman decline: military, economic, and political. But the knowledge gap made catching up harder until it became almost impossible. --- ## **Artificial Intelligence: Do Not Miss It Again** Today, the same patterns that slowed the Ottomans three centuries ago are repeating around artificial intelligence. **"This is not a tool for us."** The strongest AI models today, from Anthropic, OpenAI, and others, are built in English first, just as the printing press was built for Latin script. These models perform noticeably better in English than in Arabic. The harder part is that the gap will widen: these companies will release stronger and smarter generations while we keep using the weaker versions and fall behind with every new generation. That will not change unless we invest from the inside in models that serve our language and context. The Ottomans did not invest in developing the press for Arabic, so they kept waiting for a tool that never arrived. The question today is: will we invest in AI that works for us, or wait until someone else builds it for us? **"It will take our jobs."** Scribes feared the printing press and carried a coffin to the Sultan's palace. Today, professionals fear that AI will replace them. In both cases, the fear is reasonable. But the scribes who resisted the press did not save their profession. They delayed their society. The danger is not that AI takes your job. The danger is living in a society that fell behind because it was afraid to change. **"We do not need it."** Ottoman society looked at its thriving manuscript economy and asked: why change? Institutions today look at their existing systems and see no crisis. But the Ottomans also saw no crisis until European armies arrived, fed by centuries of knowledge and innovation. The absence of crisis is not evidence that there is no need. Real investment does not mean opening a tool and asking it a question. It means a teacher using an intelligent agent to design a learning path for each student, and a doctor using an agent to analyze thousands of papers and catch what might be missed. It means institutions redesigning how they work from the ground up, not adding an AI tool to the edge of an old workflow. --- > The Ottomans did not reject the printing press. But they did not invest in turning it into a tool that served them. > The technology sat in the room for 236 years and nobody picked it up. > > Artificial intelligence is in our hands now. What will we do with it? ## Short version ## **When Books Became Cheap** In the 1450s, the German Johannes Gutenberg developed a system for printing with movable metal type. Before him, copying one book took months of work from a dedicated scribe. After him, hundreds of copies could be printed in days. Printing presses spread across Europe within decades. Books became cheaper and reached hands they would never have reached before. Then everything accelerated: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution. But that shift did not properly reach the Islamic world until almost 280 years later. --- ## **They Were Not Stupid** The Ottomans were not anti-technology. The Ottoman state adopted cannons and rifles before they were widespread in Europe itself, and imported gunpowder and tobacco without hesitation. But it looked at the printing press and did not see why it mattered. The press was a tool built for the Latin alphabet. What it produced in Arabic looked ugly compared with manuscript calligraphy. No one was asking for printed books, and no one was complaining about a shortage of books. So the state ignored it for roughly 280 years. What is striking is that the technology was not far away. Istanbul's Jews founded a Hebrew press in 1493, during the reign of Sultan Bayezid II himself. Armenian presses followed in 1567, and Greek presses in 1627. The printing press was in the same room. But nobody thought it belonged to them. --- ## **A Tool That Was Not Built for Us** Arabic type needed around **900 typographic forms** to cover connected and disconnected letter shapes, compared with roughly 150 for Latin script. Printing in Arabic cost several times more, and the result was worse. The first attempt to print the Quran, in Venice in 1537, made things worse. The edition was full of errors, nobody bought it, and the press shut down. That experience hardened the idea that printing and Arabic simply did not mix. More than a century later, the French orientalist Antoine Galland described what he saw in Istanbul's markets between 1672 and 1673: printed medical books gathering dust on shelves while the same manuscript versions sold easily despite their higher price. People saw the printed book as a cheap, low-value object. The conclusion made sense: this tool is not for us. But the right response was not to reject the tool. It was to invest in making it work for Arabic the way it worked for Latin. Nobody did that for 280 years. --- The problem was not one decision from the state. Fear of losing work, fear of losing authority, and the way society received knowledge all made the absence of demand look like the absence of need. 3% The literacy rate among Muslims in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the nineteenth century, compared with forty to sixty percent in northwestern Europe --- ## **The Price of the Blind Spot** When Ibrahim Muteferrika received a decree from Sultan Ahmed III in 1727, he printed only seventeen books across thirteen years before his press stopped in 1742. It was almost three centuries late. Meanwhile, the historian Donald Quataert noted that literacy among Muslims in the Ottoman Empire did not exceed three percent at the beginning of the nineteenth century, compared with forty to sixty percent in northwestern Europe. For context: Russia, which was also late to adopt the press, was only around five percent. The gap was not between East and West. It was between those who adopted the printing press and those who did not. A 2011 study by the economist Jeremiah Dittmar found that European cities that adopted the press in the fifteenth century **grew sixty percent faster** than comparable cities. A 2022 quantitative study by Bogdan Popescu and Mircea Popa, after analyzing 600 years of data, also concluded that regions under Ottoman rule for longer periods had much lower literacy rates well into the twentieth century. Many factors contributed to the Ottoman decline: military, economic, and political. But the knowledge gap made catching up harder until it became almost impossible. --- ## **Artificial Intelligence: Do Not Miss It Again** Today, the same patterns that slowed the Ottomans three centuries ago are repeating around artificial intelligence. **"This is not a tool for us."** The strongest AI models today, from Anthropic, OpenAI, and others, are built in English first, just as the printing press was built for Latin script. These models perform noticeably better in English than in Arabic. The harder part is that the gap will widen: these companies will release stronger and smarter generations while we keep using the weaker versions and fall behind with every new generation. That will not change unless we invest from the inside in models that serve our language and context. The Ottomans did not invest in developing the press for Arabic, so they kept waiting for a tool that never arrived. The question today is: will we invest in AI that works for us, or wait until someone else builds it for us? **"It will take our jobs."** Scribes feared the printing press and carried a coffin to the Sultan's palace. Today, professionals fear that AI will replace them. In both cases, the fear is reasonable. But the scribes who resisted the press did not save their profession. They delayed their society. The danger is not that AI takes your job. The danger is living in a society that fell behind because it was afraid to change. **"We do not need it."** Ottoman society looked at its thriving manuscript economy and asked: why change? Institutions today look at their existing systems and see no crisis. But the Ottomans also saw no crisis until European armies arrived, fed by centuries of knowledge and innovation. The absence of crisis is not evidence that there is no need. Real investment does not mean opening a tool and asking it a question. It means a teacher using an intelligent agent to design a learning path for each student, and a doctor using an agent to analyze thousands of papers and catch what might be missed. It means institutions redesigning how they work from the ground up, not adding an AI tool to the edge of an old workflow. --- > The Ottomans did not reject the printing press. But they did not invest in turning it into a tool that served them. > The technology sat in the room for 236 years and nobody picked it up. > > Artificial intelligence is in our hands now. What will we do with it?